Arlo Mendez, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, has spent the last 12 years operating on a strict routine of early morning black coffee, three hours in his cluttered garage workshop, frozen meatloaf for dinner three nights a week, and one local minor league baseball game broadcast a week. His biggest flaw is that he’s convinced he’s uninterestingly set in his ways, a leftover jab from his ex-wife when she left him for a 38-year-old competitive cycling coach who drank matcha lattes and hated power tools. He hasn’t asked anyone out since. He’s manning the woodcarving demo booth at the small town’s annual fall festival when she walks up, wool cardigan slung over her arm, silver hoops catching the weak October sun.
He doesn’t recognize her at first, which is rare in a town where everyone knows everyone’s business. She leans over the folding table he’s set up with half-finished carvings, the hem of her cream sweater brushing his knuckle as she reaches for the lopsided little bear he’d nicked with his pocket knife ten minutes earlier. Her fingers are cool, and he notices a faint callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades. “That one’s flawed,” he says, nodding at the chip in the bear’s left ear. “Was gonna toss it later.”
She picks it up, turning it over in her palm, and holds his gaze longer than polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smile. “I like the chip. Makes him look like he’s got a story.” Her voice is a little raspy, like she spends half her day talking over rowdy kids, and Arlo’s chest feels tight for a second, the way it used to when he was 16 and a girl smiled at him in the cafeteria. He tells himself he’s being an idiot. She’s probably the new librarian he’d heard the PTA ladies gossiping about at the grocery store last week, the kind of woman who reads Pulitzer winners and drinks wine out of stemmed glasses, who’d laugh if she knew his favorite book is a tattered 1987 copy of a hunting memoir he’s read 14 times.
The wind picks up, carrying the smell of fried Oreos and spiced apple cider from the food stand two booths over, and a gust blows a strand of her dark gray hair into her face. She tucks it behind her ear, and her elbow bumps his shoulder when she sets the bear back down on the table. He doesn’t move away. “Clara,” she says, holding her hand out. He shakes it, his calloused palm wrapping around hers, and notices she doesn’t flinch at the thick, pale scar slicing across his left hand, the one he got from a table saw accident in 2003 when a student knocked a stack of 2x4s off the workbench. “Arlo,” he says. “Used to teach woodshop at the high school.”
He spends the next 40 minutes talking to her while kids wander up to grab free pre-carved wooden whistles, and she doesn’t check her phone once, doesn’t glance over his shoulder like she’s looking for someone better to talk to. She asks him about the tiny bird carvings he leaves on the shelf of the free little library by the park, says she’s been collecting them for the last three months, keeps them on her desk at work. He’s stunned. He’d thought no one noticed those, that they just got taken by kids or tossed when the shelf got too full. He almost chokes on his coffee when she says she’s stopped by his booth every day for the last three days, just working up the nerve to talk to him.
His first instinct is to make an excuse, to tell her he’s got to get home to feed a cat he doesn’t even own, to run away before he can embarrass himself. But she’s leaning in, their knees almost touching under the table, and he can smell lavender and old paper on her sweater, and he can’t make himself lie. When she asks if he wants to get a cup of cider after his shift ends in 10 minutes, he says yes before he can overthink it.
They sit on a weathered picnic bench on the edge of the festival grounds, sipping cider that’s spiked with a little bourbon, the way the fire department always makes it at the festival. She tells him she moved here three months earlier after her husband died, that she’d grown up spending summers at her grandma’s cabin outside town and always wanted to come back. He tells her about the workshop in his garage, the stack of half-finished toy cars he’s making for the local foster care program’s Christmas drive. When he mentions the scar on his hand, the one his ex used to call “that ugly thing” whenever they went to weddings, she reaches across the table and runs her thumb over it, slow, like she’s memorizing the shape of it. “Marks just mean you’ve lived,” she says, and he feels something tight in his chest unwind, like a knot he didn’t even know was there finally pulling loose.
He asks her if she wants to come back to his place to see the toy cars, if she wants to help him paint the details on the doors if she’s got time. She says yes, grinning, and finishes her cider in one long sip. They walk back to his beat up 2008 Ford F-150 parked down the street, her carrying the box of leftover free carvings for him, their elbows bumping every other step as they crunch through fallen maple leaves. The sun is setting, painting the sky soft pink and tangerine, and when he stops to unlock the passenger door for her, she leans in and kisses his cheek, quick and soft, like she’s been wanting to do it all afternoon. He fumbles the truck keys for half a second before getting the lock to turn, his ears still warm where her lips had brushed them, and grins so wide his cheeks ache.
